Ian Hacking Biography Quotes 4 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education

Ian Hacking was born on February 18, 1936, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and became one of the most influential philosophers of science of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He pursued undergraduate studies in his home country before moving to the University of Cambridge, where he completed a doctorate and absorbed the analytic tradition then dominant in British philosophy. Cambridge honed his rigorous style and his talent for building bridges between philosophy, history, and the practices of science.

Academic Career

Hacking held appointments at leading universities on both sides of the Atlantic. Early in his career he returned to Canada to teach, and later he joined Stanford University, where he worked alongside figures in philosophy and the foundations of science, including Patrick Suppes and Nancy Cartwright. He subsequently spent many years at the University of Toronto, where he was a central presence in philosophy of science and the history of ideas. He was also elected to the College de France to hold the Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts, a rare honor that situated him in the heart of French intellectual life. He died on May 10, 2023.

Philosophical Orientation

Hacking is often associated with a distinctive realism anchored in experimental practice. In Representing and Intervening, he argued that philosophical accounts of science must take experiments and laboratory work as seriously as theories and representations. He defended entity realism: while theoretical frameworks may be revisable, the entities that scientists can manipulate and use to bring about effects command a special kind of warrant. This perspective opened a path between traditional scientific realism and more skeptical or instrumentalist views, and it resonated with debates shaped by Thomas Kuhn and, in a different register, Bas van Fraassen.

Probability and the History of Science

Two of Hacking's early books, The Emergence of Probability and The Taming of Chance, traced how probabilistic thinking formed in early modern Europe and then transformed nineteenth-century governance, social statistics, and ideas of risk. Rather than treating probability as a purely mathematical object, he tied it to practices of counting, classifying, and administering uncertain populations. His historical method, inspired in part by the work of historians of science such as A. C. Crombie and later in conversation with scholars like Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, made clear how conceptual change depends on instruments, institutions, and the mundane routines of quantification.

Human Kinds, Classification, and Social Construction

Hacking became a leading voice in clarifying what it means to call something "socially constructed". In The Social Construction of What?, he distinguished different uses of the phrase and insisted on precision: some claims are about how classifications arise, others about their consequences. He developed the ideas of "interactive kinds" and "looping effects", showing how people respond to the categories used to describe them, thereby changing the categories themselves. Rewriting the Soul examined multiple personality and the sciences of memory, while Mad Travelers explored the late nineteenth-century phenomenon of fugue. These studies demonstrated how scientific and medical classifications can create possibilities for self-understanding and behavior, reshaping the very kinds of people who are being classified.

Styles of Reasoning and Mathematics

Late in his career Hacking deepened his account of the plurality of scientific methods by elaborating "styles of scientific reasoning", drawing on Crombie's schema of historically distinct but coexisting styles. Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics at All? extended this idea to mathematics, asking how different styles sustain the autonomy and authority of mathematical practice. His pluralism did not collapse into relativism; rather, he insisted that styles have self-authenticating standards of success rooted in communal practice, instruments, and problem-solving traditions.

Influences, Interlocutors, and Intellectual Milieu

Hacking's historical ontology bore the imprint of Michel Foucault, whose work on knowledge and power helped frame Hacking's interest in how classifications make up people. He engaged with the legacy of Kuhn on paradigms and scientific change, while offering a distinct emphasis on experimentation. In realism debates he exchanged arguments with Bas van Fraassen's constructive empiricism and found common ground and points of departure with Nancy Cartwright's attention to models and causal capacities. His historical studies often converged with work by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison on objectivity and scientific images, and he conversed with broader science studies currents associated with Andrew Pickering and, more distantly, Bruno Latour. Across institutions he collaborated collegially with historians, sociologists, and practising scientists, reflecting his conviction that philosophy of science belongs alongside the sciences it studies.

Recognition and Honors

Hacking's scholarship earned major international recognition, including the Holberg Prize in 2009, awarded for outstanding work in the humanities, social sciences, law, or theology. He was elected to learned societies in Canada and abroad, and his writings were translated widely. Beyond formal honors, his influence is evident in the way philosophers and historians now integrate case studies, instruments, and laboratory practices into accounts of knowledge.

Legacy

Ian Hacking left a model for how to do philosophy historically and concretely. He showed that philosophical clarity can coexist with archival depth, and that conceptual analysis gains power when connected to the devices, measurements, and classifications that organize modern life. Generations of students and readers learned from his lucid prose and generously framed debates. By uniting the analytic and historical traditions, and by treating human kinds and scientific entities with equal seriousness, he reshaped the agenda for philosophy of science and helped explain how, in both the natural and human sciences, our ways of knowing and our ways of living continually make and remake each other.